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Why Size Matters For Your SSD Purchase

Vigile writes "Performance analysis on solid state drives is still coming into clarity as more manufacturers enter the fold and more of the drives find their way into users' hands. While Intel's dominance in the SSD market was once undoubted, newer garbage collection methods from Indilinx and Samsung are now balancing performance across the the major players. What hasn't been discussed in great detail yet is the effect that drive capacity can have on overall performance. Some smaller drives (64GB versus 128GB) will actually use fewer data channels from the controller chip and thus will have lower transfer speeds. The article compares drives using controllers from Indilinx, Samsung and Intel." Note that PCPer greedily spans this review over 12 pages. Next time maybe they can keep it down to something more reasonable.

13 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Size. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    6.40 inches ought to be enough for anybody.

    1. Re:Size. by BronsCon · · Score: 4, Funny

      I don't know whether to mod this troll, offtopic, flamebait, or funny, so I'm replying instead. Well played.

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      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  2. The short story by symbolset · · Score: 5, Informative

    Intel X25-M 160GB totally dominates in IOPS and doesn't suffer in the other categories. A clean win.

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    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  3. Re:take a stand by BronsCon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I use adblock primarily for these sites.

    When I come across a site that doesn't do this bullshit, I make sure to allow their ads.

    Hell, Slashdot is giving me the option of disabling advertising just by clicking a checkbox; I'm not doing it.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  4. SSD can be a pain because of extra work by damonlab · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have never bothered with firmware updates and additional configuration steps with standard IDE, SATA, SCSI, and SAS drives. While looking around at various SSD, I found that you need to go though all of this additional crap to get things working right. OCZ, for example, has a whole forum dedicated to help tweak out their drives. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186

    1. Re:SSD can be a pain because of extra work by Kayden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      OCZ also has forums dedicated to tweaking ram. There are thousands of forums on the internet dedicated to tweaking every part of a computer. Working "right" isn't "as fast as possible". Most components are configured to run less than optimum so they last longer. Granted, early SSD drives had issues with the abysmal cache causing stuttering, but really, that's just a design fault, not something endemic to the hardware line.

  5. Price by symbolset · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the article:

    I was going to include a price comparison, but a few of the units tested (like the Corsair P64) don't seem to be carried anywhere as of yet. That said, prices generally do not sway far from the cost/GB of ~$2.75 set by Intel when they released their G2 drives at record low prices. The exception here is the SLC-based PhotoFast V4S, which will retail for a whopping $499 (that's $15/GB in case you ran out of fingers and toes).

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  6. fewer pages = better server performance by SethJohnson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Stuffing it all into 1-6 pages would do nothing more than insure that when they got slashdotted, they'd drown their server faster.

    Actually, fewer pages with more text content delivered per http request would reduce the load on the server. The bigger impact on the server is repeated visits to the hard drive and trips to the database. When one article requires 12 separate page requests, that cranks up the number of http requests coming in that have to be responded to with hard drive file reads and database queries.

    Not knowing their specific server architecture, the above is a generalization. Caching, virtual memory mapped file systems, etc. can alleviate these bottlenecks.

    Seth

  7. You need AutoPager by Ben+Jackson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I use adblock primarily for these sites.

    Then you're doing it wrong! The plugin you want for 12-page reviews is AutoPager. It works like the /. home page, loading 'next' pages as you get near the bottom. It's even smart enough to strip off headers and footers.

  8. Re:Pussy hurt much? by SBrach · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's why I boycott books. I mean the scroll format was obviously much better. Turning pages wastes time and saliva, plus there is the mortal danger of paper cuts. Until books and magazines come in a sensible scroll format I won't be buying either.

  9. Filesystem vs drive size by mtemmerm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Slightly off topic, but it's often forgotten that the filesystem also plays an important role in drive performance. Newer filesystems like NILFS (http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7345/1.html) are created to suit SSD's instead of the legacy rotating media. It claims to hold the same performance, no matter how large the filesystem is.

    Back on topic: We're seeing the same evolution with SSD's now like we saw it with spinning media several years back, when they started to increase the drive size ever more. Eventually these performance differences between larger and smaller drives will disappear: they will simply not be an issue anymore at all when you won't be able to get SSD's smaller than 200GB, like the similar trend with spinning media.

  10. Super Star Destroyer by egamma · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think that in order to be classified as a Super Star Destroyer, it has to be at least 15km long. Although the salesman will tell you it's worth at least 20 regular Star Destroyers, the price you pay should be no more than the cost of 15 Imperial-class SD's. Also, be on the lookout for used SSDs. They may be infested with Conduit worms, affecting the ability of the SSD to fire its cannons.

  11. Re:Multi-Page = Horrible by Vigile · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't want to turn this into the eternal "free web content ain't free" debate - but it's not. I run the site and yes this article might have been condensed to 9-10 pages more reasonably, but the author laid out the pages before filling in the content and was in a rush. Sorry.

    As for those that block ads, etc. I realize WHY you do it but I would hope that once in a while you think of people that run these types of sites: we employee 8 people on pcper.com and we charge you NOTHING to read the content, etc. These 8 people depend on the ad revenue to live, function and continue writing.

    Just a thought.